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I was generally trying to give them small debuffs with the idea that the player could opt not to subclass, instead just staying with their original class. With debuffs, it creates a reason for certain players to stick with their original, kind of giving each class three different variants.

Agreed. While I don't know how well my own proposed subclasses would fit a theoretical playthrough experience, I tried to generally keep them somewhat similar to the niche of their original classes (both Malefactor subclasses still play into being a scout and a scavenger, for example) so that the subclasses hopefully wouldn't play wildly different from their base class. They are moreso designed with multiplayer and roleplay purposes in mind though, so players with similar playstyles could still spec into slightly different niches depending on which aspects they preferred. One malefactor player might like exploration and stealth, opting for the wanderer subclass, while another might like raiding ruins and so opt for the treasure hunter. No matter which they pick their malefactor is still good at both, they are just slightly better in one or the other. It's kind of like choosing what elements of the original class' playstyle you like best, and further amplifying them a little bit. I do think VS' base classes are decently balanced though, aside from tailor who would greatly benefit from the future addition of immersive weaving. The fact you can ask around and get all sorts of different answers to "which class is best?" questions goes to show that generally, all of the classes are about roughly as good as each other.

While a knight of the order would be cool, I don't know how they would be all that distinct from the existing blackguard. Both are soldiers/fighters, the main difference being that the forlorn hope were cavalry fighters while the blackguard fought on foot in the enclosed tunnels. I could potentially see a forlorn knight getting a faster riding/turning speed when on an elk as some kind of rider/horsemanship perk, but other than that I imagine they would both play somewhat similarly. I would propose a slight movespeed perk to a forlorn knight given that they fought in slightly lighter armour, but I think that would make them a bit too powerful, if they were a combat-focused class with a speed buff.

I had an idea about an interesting way to handle class buffs/debuffs and expanded classes - allowing players to subclass into one of two options depending on their starting class, or remain as they are. At some point in the gameplay progression or the story progression, the player's Seraph would have been in the new world long enough to form a subclass, somewhat distinct from what they used to be. What is a malefactor who is no longer on the run, a blackguard without their squadron, a clockmaker without the grand machine? The subclasses would also not influence class-specific NPC dialogue or class backstory, as they are just adaptations of the base classes the Seraph has made after being in the world for some time. The subclass choices would play into one specific aspect of that base class - tailor for example might have a choice between staying as a tailor, becoming an artisan (some cheaper crafts) or a merchant (cheaper trades, higher sell prices). ----- These are the (very rough) ideas I've had for subclasses: Hunter: Archer / Tracker Archer would gain a further +5% ranged damage, +10% ranged accuracy and +5% ranged distance, at the cost of a +15% increased bow draw time. They have to line up their shots, after all! Tracker would only really work if some way to track game was added. They would be able to track injured animals for longer without tracks fading away, and tracks would be more visually obvious to them. This would come at the cost of -10% ranged distance, since they would incentivise getting closer to prey. Malefactor: Wanderer / Treasure Hunter Wanderer gains the fleetfooted trait (+10% movement speed), as well as a -10% hunger rate, making them ideal for exploration and scouting work. This comes at the cost of a 10% ranged damage penalty, as well as a further loss of 1.5 health points. The treasure hunter has the unique ability of rerolling loot tables. When they open a chest and the item inside is generated, the game rolls the loot table twice. Whichever option was rarer (had a lower % chance to appear) is the one that shows up instead. If both rolls have equal chances to appear, the game rolls a 50/50 chance for one or the other to appear. This comes at the cost of halving their default chances for double foraged items and cracked vessels. Blackguard: Skirmisher / Bulwark Skirmisher gains a further +5% attack damage, and +5% movement speed, at the cost of a 15% ranged distance penalty. Not all that different to regular blackguard, but I hope different enough that some might subclass into them while others remain as a normal blackguard. Bulwark is designed as a pure tank. They lose 10% movement speed, making them the slowest class in the game. To compensate, they gain a further 10% attack damage, 10% attack speed, and shields will protect up to 15 damage per hit instead of the usual 10. Clockmaker: Tinkerer / Engineer The tinkerer would be able to turn any Jonas part into a different Jonas part, at the cost of some metal parts, cupornickel nails and strips and a temporal gear. Probably more useful once more Jonastech is added to the game. This would come at the cost of a furthered -5% melee damage, and +5% hunger rate. It was a little hard to come up with debuffs for them, so let me know if you have any better ideas. The engineer would be able to command up to three regular locusts at once, two corrupt locusts, or one sawblade locust, making them into a sort of pseudo-summoner class. They would also gain an additional +5% damage to mechanical enemies. The tradeoff for this would be taking 10% more damage from mechanical enemies themselves, and -5% walkspeed, leaving them still faster than average but not quite fleetfooted. Tailor: Artisan / Merchant Artisan gets reduced requirements for certain important crafting recipes. Things like windmill sails, hides having a better fat-pelt ratio (1 fat for 3 medium hides, rather than for 2), and gets more clay voxels per clay item when making pottery. Merchant gets 15% lowered prices on trades, and will sell items for 15% more. Basically just designed to give tailor players a lategame buying/selling clothes, and setting up trade routes to offset their weaknesses with bought items. I really don't know what kinds of downsides I would give to each of these, as tailor is already quite weak. Let me know if you can think of any! ----- I don't quite know how well these proposed stats would fit the basegame in an actual playthrough or multiplayer scenario, but even then something like this would be fun to see as a mod. I just thought subclasses would be an interesting way to flesh out character progression and add some variety, and tried to make a good few of them somewhat unique and not just reliant on stat buffs. Anyway, this was just a fun idea I had! Let me know what you think, how you would balance it, or if any of these sound a bit too overpowered compared to their regular class.

Currently in the game we have scrap weapons, which can be crafted from one metal scrap, a stick and some rope. They're a sidegrade/alternative to copper, having identical damage but slightly lower durability. I was thinking a little while ago about having upgraded scrap weapons that would function as a bronze alternative/sidegrade, and would be quite fitting with VS' post-apocalyptic theme. We already have a soldering iron and solder bars in the game, used for the distillery, and I think it could be interesting to give those another use as required tools to make "welded scrap" weapons. These would be similar to the existing scrap weapons, though visually more sturdy, being welded together instead of tied together. Statistically they would be as good as bronze tools, though have worse durability. Originally I came up with this concept as part of a malefactor class exclusive, though I also think it could be made available for everyone. The main idea was to give use to the soldering iron since it is quite the neglected tool currently, and to offer an interesting way to get some better tools through going out exploring and looting ruins. Vanilla scrap weapons offer an interesting sidegrade to copper, and meteoric iron is a nice sidegrade to regular iron found in a different way, but bronze only has its multiple types, all acquired through similar mining and casting/smithing methods. Anyway, what does everyone think? Do you like this idea, do you think it's wildly unbalanced or something, let me know!

In a new interview with Tyron and Saraty by Mahjong Blonsky, Saraty mentioned she'd like to have immersive weaving in the game at some point, and being able to make custom carpets pixel by pixel. Very exciting stuff!

Yep, it's definitely some of the psychedelic mushrooms from 1.22

Update on this part, this happened in 1.22 rc-3! It now does indeed function as an alternate look for the fur coat, since their stats are identical.

That'd be fun, I like that idea. Having the rack as an optional upgrade to make the process easier or speed it up a little. Maybe something like a fleshing tool could be gated behind iron (not really realistic, but just for gameplay balance) and could be used to remove the fur much more efficiently than with a knife.

It's been on the roadmap for quite some time that the plan is eventually to do away with grid crafting, and a step towards this was implemented in 1.22 - to scrape a hide, you now have to place it on the ground, hold right click on it with a knife, and wait a few seconds. (By the way, I'm not talking about smithing and clay forming in this post, since those are both really good examples of the kind of gameplay/engagement I'm talking about). (Edit: I just realised grid crafting to scrape hides still works. I don't know if that's intended or not though, since it is much easier than scraping them on the ground manually. Maybe it's a sign the current scraping is a placeholder?) This got me thinking about the future of the in-world crafting systems in the game, and how I hope this mechanic is something of a placeholder rather than a finalised design. I don't actually dislike this change or anything, I think it makes sense and isn't that annoying. However, I do hope other in-world crafting mechanics are not similar to it. Scraping the hide on the ground only adds a bit more tedium to the process, since each hide must be placed on the ground and scraped individually, and doing so takes a little bit of time. I personally feel like this could be a more engaging mechanic if something like a hide rack was added, where players would hang their hides and then play a very basic minigame where they have to move the knife over the hide a few times to scrape it. Something like this would give a reason for hide scraping to be in-world crafting, rather than being a slightly more tedious version of grid crafting. Having the player actually scrape the hide themselves would add that small element of gameplay to the system, as opposed to just having to press and hold down a button. The current system doesn't really have a reason for why it needs to be done in-world rather than in the grid, and a small minigame would give it that reason. What I'm getting at is that if other systems were eventually changed from grid to in-world, I'd hope they have some element of interactivity. As a theoretical example, instead of stirring ingredients in a barrel by looking at it and holding down shift and right click, which would feel a little clunky and only add waiting time to the process, players might actually have to interact with the barrel and then move their mouse in circles a few times. Anyway, let me know what you think! I just wanted to put my thoughts out there on the topic, and how I think in-world crafting could go about being implemented in a way that adds to the gameplay rather than only adding to the time taken. The idea of in-world crafting is so vast, with so many interesting things that could be done, and I'd love to see it given a real reason for being implemented. (Edit: In the meantime, a way to swap which keybind is used for these in-world interactions would be nice. I bind my sprint to shift and my crouch to ctrl, but having the choice to hold shift instead of ctrl to scrape hides would be more ergonomic. )

With the instruments being implied in the "Ghosts" short story to be a representation of different accents, it's very funny to imagine monsters being drawn to/scared of a specific accent. It's an interesting suggestion though, and I do agree with the damage noise ideas. I feel like the hunger noise has been changed in 1.22 though, I was testing the release candidate and it seems shorter and a little lower pitched than I remember.

Killing the trader does not remove the claim, and they should respawn after a while. However, they might still be angry. The only thing that killing traders really accomplishes is hurting yourself later down the line if they're still upset at you. The easiest way might just be going into creative mode, since creative allows you to modify things regardless of land claims, like what @PoisonedPawn777 said.

I really hope we get the palisades too, maybe introduced like fences so that you don't need to craft all the corner pieces seperatley. All of the NPC structures in the game now use palisades, and it feels strange that we can't use them as well, given they are shown to be such an important part of survival against the Rust monsters. For actual gameplay I think a decent way of balancing them if they were to do damage would be having enemies attempt not to pathfind over them (like fences), and potentially having the ground-placed wooden stakes break or go blunt after damaging an enemy a few times, so they couldn't be used for mob grinders.

Honestly I also think sewing kits should be split into two items. There would be a regular sewing kit, crafted by any class. It would be used for clothing repair instead of linen sheets, and would also be used when crafting basic clothes. There would also be a special tailor sewing kit that repairs 75% instead of 50%, and is used to craft the tailor-exclusive clothes. This could also be the type sold by traders, since it would be slightly more valuable to non-tailors due to the higher repair amount. I feel like this would help clear up some of the confusion surrounding clothing repair for new players. Using linen sheets isn't very intuitive, and I've often seen people who think clothing repair is actually impossible without a sewing kit.

I could see that. Or alternately, allowing sewing kits to repair past 100%, capping at some higher value. That'd make the clothes last longer, without needing to nerf linen sheet repairs.

In my eyes I think this mightn't be the best idea, since for it to actually work like this you'd need to remove clothing repair from everyone except tailor. Clothing repair is already something tailor has a 25% efficiency bonus to, and taking that ability away from everyone else would make a big incentive for ruin hunting and trading lategame (finding/buying unique clothing) basically useless if those clothes couldn't be repaired. Story locations and ruins would become less interesting since clothing is a big part of their loot, and things like Nadiyan fur would be a painful gear sink to maintain - you'd have to spend around 100 gears per set each time it degraded to buy an entirely new one. The only way I could see removing repair being an okay design choice would be if clothing traders and the Nadiyan tailor could repair clothes for you at a cost, but that's just less convenient, impossible for Homo Sapiens players and less interesting than having to ration out linen sheets for the repairs yourself. Personally I think that the current repair system is pretty fine, considering that non-tailor Seraphs know how to make things like windmill sails, boat sails, and basic gambeson. It makes sense that they could use those basic sewing skills to fix up clothing, but not make entirely new clothes aside from a handful of basic/survival-oriented things like the homespun set, rawhide set, fur set, fur-lined vest and arctic hunter set, among a couple others any class can craft.

The classes all get unique NPC interactions at a certain point in the story, and have a few special dialogue choices. Assuming there will be more of this in the future, I think classes might help add to the replay value of the main storyline by having slight differences/different paths to take. They're all shown to be somewhat established characters with their own backstories, though left vague enough that the player can project personality onto them and fill in the finer details themselves. In terms of balance though, I do agree there could be changes made. Some classes feel a little weak compared to the more powerful ones like Hunter and Blackguard. Tailor especially feels very arbitrary to me, since their perks are all to do with the crafting grid and stat screens rather than actual gameplay.

Oddly enough the waterwheel (and windmills) use the "generic wood" texture, rather than the normal oak. It's strange, since other mechanical power parts use the normal debarked oak texture. I'd actually really like if waterwheels and windmills used debarked oak, so they could blend in to other connected devices a little better.

I've talked about this before in another thread of mine, but I thought I'd make a separate post for discussion about this and how it could potentially be fixed. I have also put this info on the bug tracker, since it seems a bit strange and unbalanced to me. Anyway, clothing balance in 1.22 seems a little all over the place. It's kind of got me thinking about how the warmth system might be due for an overhaul at some point, perhaps with the future addition of status effects. There's only so much you can do with the current warmth system, where the difference between +2 and +3 degrees on a clothing item is a big progression point. One of the main things breaking the balance of warmth in 1.22 is the new grass clothing. For 8 dry grass per piece, you can craft grass pants and a grass shirt. Both are worth +2 each, totalling at +6 if you are wearing the grass shirt, grass pants, straw hat and straw sandals. Considering these are so cheap to make, it seems strange to me their warmth matches that of rawhide, the previous inexpensive clothing option. As I touched on in another post, I think a decent solution would be reducing this to either +1 or +1.5 per piece instead of +2, and also potentially having their niche be in providing some rain protection despite the lack of warmth. Speaking of rawhide, the rawhide tunic has been added, a shirt slot item that costs either 4 small pelts or 2 medium/large/huge pelts. It gives +3 warmth, which surpasses the previous best shirts in the game, Nadiyan fur. The previous +2.5 shirts were difficult to get and required story progression, but now a +3 is only a few hides away. This one I think could be fixed just by changing it to +2, in line with nearly every other shirt in the game. The fur-lined vest is also a +3 shirt, though it requires both leather and pelts to craft. This one I think is okay, since the leather cost means the player will likely have barrels before making it, but I think it is strange to be a shirt slot item. All other vests in the game are coat slot, which allows you to wear a shirt underneath as you'd expect. I think this could be fixed by making the fur-lined vest a coat slot item, allowing it to function as an aesthetically different option to the fur coat for the same warmth. (Seriously, the fur-lined vest looks so awesome, this would be a go-to clothing item for me if I could just wear a shirt underneath it!) Another smaller thing I noticed was that the new broadbrim hat (which I really like by the way, it's the closest thing we have to a cowboy hat ) only offers +70% rain protection, despite the size of its brim. It is larger than something like the small bamboo cone hat, which offers +85%. I think it could probably stand to be changed to +85%, or even +90%. It is quite large, after all. One thing I do really like in regards to 1.22 and new clothing warmth is the arctic hunter set. It's a new winter set that can be crafted by any class, and offers some of the best warmth in the game. The shirt is +3.5, the parka is +4, and the pants are +4. However, it requires cinnebar to craft, which can be a difficult resource to find. I think this balances it out nicely, offering a quality winter set lategame for players who don't want to do the story content, or don't want to spend their gears to buy Nadiyan fur. Anyway, that's what I've noticed of 1.22's clothing warmth values! Let me know what you think about all this, or how you think it could be improved/changed, if you think it should be.

I've been thinking about swamps and marshlands recently as well. I think they'd just be a really cool area to pass through, especially if they had unique environmental challenges like mud that slowed you down. Honestly, more varied environments would be really fun, if they are dependant on climate/temperature/rainfall/etc. Much like VS' deserts and gravel lands I imagine you'd only get swamps and marshes in very wet areas with the right conditions. I also think being caught out in the rain for extended periods should probably be a bit of a bigger deal than it currently is, incentivising you to make camps to rest or warm up, as well as coming packed with a decent hat or poncho. Prolonged exposure to the rain only makes you freeze if temperatures are already very low, and at that point it's more likely to be snowing than raining.

The problem with spears in 1.21 was mostly that they weren't just a reliable all-round weapon, they were the best weapon in the game by far, with bronze spears outclassing steel falxes in terms of DPS. To me the spear changes have felt okay from the small amount I've messed with them, and even with their now reduced damage, you could get that back up with the new quenching and tempering system. The main change has been that their windup to throw is considerably longer, so you can't shotgun them at enemies and rapidly deal insane amounts of damage.

Honestly I think dry grass clothes could be better put to use as rain protection. Have the shirt worn in the coat slot, and provide some level of rain protection with the tradeoff of not being very warm. Dried grass raincoats were a real historical thing, after all!

Just another odd balance thing, has anyone else taken a look at the grass shirt and grass pants? They're both +2 warmth each and only require a handful of dry grass to craft, which means they outclass the majority of clothing in the game through virtue of being decently warm and extremely inexpensive. I feel like if they were reduced to +1 each or +1.5, that would fit a lot better into the balance. Otherwise I can see a large amount of players only ever bothering to remake endless grass clothes every winter, not even bothering with rawhide, the previous cheapest option.

The 1.22 warmth values are kind of all over the place right now in terms of balancing - the rawhide tunic for example is a whopping +3 degrees in the shirt slot (better than Nadiyan fur) while also being very cheap to craft earlygame. (I know I mentioned both this and the fur vest earlier, but they both stand out to me the most. The fur vest really should be an upperbodyover / coat slot item instead of a shirt, as all other vests in the game can be worn over the top of a shirt like you'd expect). It's interesting to me that the tailor's new embroidered fur / arctic fisher boots aren't as good as reindeer herder shoes, I suppose that's because the shoes need cinnabar. Still, the whole cinnabar thing is a bit arbitrary in itself, considering red dye was not an uncommon luxury in the irl middle ages.

Yeah, I get that. You're right, it's just tricky to think of a way to balance tailor that makes sense when some fancy clothes can be crafted by any class - I think really the root problem is that tailor is the only "job" class, entirely focused on exclusive items rather than actual gameplay, but that would be hard to remedy without a proper weaving system or a total tailor rebalance, which seems a bit extreme. Another option would be gating some of the fancier options available for everyone behind tailor, but that just gives most players less choice overall and isn't really fun in any regard. Something else interesting is that tailor is slowly losing the one gameplay aspect they used to have - making warmer clothes than everyone else. They already lost most of that when Nadiyan fur was introduced in 1.20, though that was latergame story-gated. Now though with the arctic hunter set and some of the warmth values on the new clothes, tailor really only makes extra cosmetic choices rather than especially warm clothes. (Some of the new clothes feel like they need a balance look-over, the rawhide tunic is very cheap to craft but is one of the second warmest shirt slot items in the game, at +3 degrees. The fur-lined vest is another +3 degree item, but it goes in the shirt slot instead of the coat slot like you'd expect. I hope they move it there, since then it could be a fur coat alternative with identical stats, and would allow players to wear a shirt underneath it). EDIT: I will say though, I am very glad that all classes have the arctic hunter set. It feels to me like it rounds out winter progression a bit more, since it's a very warm set you can craft with rare materials (cinnebar) that offers an alternative to Nadiyan fur.